This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel is a powerful story about a mother and father faced with making a life-altering decision concerning their youngest child: how do they support their son, Claude, as Claude transitions to become their daughter Poppy?
In The Forgotten Girls, Detective Louise Rick returns to the area she grew up in for a fresh start. As the new head of the Missing Persons Department, she finds that her familiarity with the terrain makes things easier, however, confronting people from her past is tougher than she expects.
While reading, you get an inkling that there may be more than one mystery to be solved. True to Scandinavian crime fiction, this book doesn't shy away from tough subjects or gory details.
Did you know that the United States does not have a writers museum? We celebrate authors and have museums for visual arts (among many other things), but we don't really have a museum for writers and their books.
An article from Smithsonian.com recently caught our eye, not only for its content but because it also resembles something happening locally.
Today we get to feature a writer who splits her time between authoring fiction and offering guidance to aspiring authors. Booklist described her most recent release as an enjoyable yet sobering mystery with a surprising twist for inquisitive readers.
“Why can’t music be magic? Aren’t spells just words you repeat? And what are songs? Lyrics that play over and over again. The words are like a formula.”
An anonymous call comes in to the Stonybatter police station, instead of the emergency line in Dublin. The caller says that a woman may have fallen and hurt inside her own home. When police arrive, all the doors are locked and they find Aislinn Murray dead, but not from a fall. The case gets passed on to the Murder Squad. Detectives Conway and Moran have the case handed to them by their boss, just as they are looking to clock out and go home. Antoinette Conway is the only woman on the squad, and isn't well liked, she's brusque, confrontational, and keeps to herself.
It's not often you visit an author's website and find six forthcoming books featured, but such is currently the case with Liberty, Missouri's Jody Jensen Shaffer. To find out how she's managed to accomplish such a feat, read on . . .
I need to preface this review with a disclaimer: if you are a person for whom clunky controls are a deal-breaker, you might want to watch a Let’s Play on YouTube. If you can tolerate poor mechanics for the sake of an utterly amazing absolutely everything else, then by all means, play this game.
For a poetry newbie, Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation is a nice introduction to the greats, both contemporary and historical. Hildegard of Bingen, who died in the 1100s, is included, yet so are poets like Billy Collins and Marie Howe who are alive and well.
My favorite, I think, is "So Much Happiness" by Naomi Shihab Nye, which begins,
